


A Story of Ghost

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Adoption, Awkwardness, Found Family, Geniuses, Hacking, Homelessness, It's For a Case, Multi, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 13:17:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13249020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: While investigating the status of a building owned by a client, Leverage International comes across a vigilante hacker - a homeless teenage boy using his computer skills to protect the other members of his "family".





	A Story of Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poppetawoppet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppetawoppet/gifts).



> Prompt #2. Eliot/Parker/Hardison established relationship. Accidental pre-teen acquisition. One of them brings home a stray. The others immediately take to the kid, who at first is sullen, then slightly weirded out by these grown ups who also apparently can do all sorts of illegal?
> 
> One of the drawbacks of having such brilliant prompts at my disposal is that I just don't have the space to do them all the level of justice they deserve. I hope very much that you enjoy my take on this one though, and thank you again for joining our fun.

He wasn’t like the others that wandered the length and breadth of the internet, learning its secrets and taking what he could. He was known but he wasn’t – the people that came to him for help in the waking world called him ‘Ghost’, more from a need to call him _something_ than any need he had to be called. Those in the digital world never saw him at all – they just knew that occasionally something stopped being where it was supposed to be.

They never knew why.

Ghost had called a lot of places home since turning his back on the foster care system; the most recent being a half-finished office tower that he supposed had been a good idea in 2008 when the world’s economy had been blown to hell. Now it was a fading note on some developer’s “To Do” list, and shelter to nearly a dozen street families. Ghost had moved in with five days’ change of clothes, and the laptop his last foster family had bought in an attempt to curry favor.

It took the families living there over a month to realize he was there, and that he didn’t belong to any of them. Arguments over what to do with him might have taken nearly as long if a timely order from Dominos large enough to feed all of them hadn’t shown up at just that moment.

In the end he was unofficially adopted by all of them, and allowed a space on the top floor of the building for his own use.

Gradually the relationship between Ghost and his ‘family’ evolved into a mutually beneficial ‘give and take’. Never anything big enough to put them on the wrong person’s radar; just enough to make their circumstances something better than ‘tragic’.

_Until…_

“Seriously, Parker? How hard is it for you to stay away from the goddamn edge?”

“Don’t be such a baby – I’ve done jumps from higher than this!”

“Yeah, and I bet you were wearing your harness at the time, weren’t you?”

If the voices echoing off the bare stone walls hadn’t been enough motivation, the flashing of the proximity alarms he’d written for his own network would have been enough to get Ghost moving. Heart pounding with an unexpected surge of adrenaline, Ghost’s fingers flew as he disconnected himself from both the virtual and the physical world with equal speed.

“I’m telling you Hardison, there is nothing here like what you showed us.” Grabbing his laptop and what cords he could reach, Ghost threw himself into his preferred hiding spot – a small, walled-in space that somebody had once suggested was probably intended as a coat closet. “There’s a lot of homeless squatting here, and I’m not saying that they’re not stealing power, but no kind of set-up to make a building disappear.”

His choice of words drew Ghost’s attention, and he risked stealing a glance at the intruders. “I don’t like it,” the woman who’d spoken earlier said. She was confident and beautiful – blond hair caught up in a ponytail at the back of her head. “Magnus Industries said they were tearing this building down, right? What happens to all these people?”

Ghost felt his heart sink. One of the first things he’d done for his new family was ‘hide’ the location of the office building. He couldn’t make it vanish from the waking world, but so long as the taxes were paid it was fairly easy to keep it off registries and deeds and plats and the like. The risk, of course, was that at some point Mr. Rich Building Owner would remember that he had a building at that address and start wondering why there was no digital proof of its existence.

The woman’s companion stepped into view. He was dressed well, but carried himself like somebody who knew how to fight. And his expression seemed to be set in a permanent scowl – what the little girls who lived two floors below Ghost called “resting bitch face”.

“He’s right,” the man said. “We’ll figure something out. I just don’t see how leaving them here is any kind of option.”  
************************  
“Can we focus please, people?” Hardison asked, not unmindful of how absurd the request sounded coming from _him_. “Power levels have dropped back to normal, but whoever this hacker is you have to be right on top of him. He would have had to come past both of you to get off the floor.”

He glanced at the monitor he’d designated to back-trace his opponent’s work, and while he never would have admitted it out loud to the others, Hardison was impressed. _What I don’t get is what are you after?_ The building had been ‘disappeared’ as efficiently as anything he’d ever seen, but there seemed to be no goal beyond the theft – if that was what they were going to call it.

 _”Someone on this level too,”_ Eliot said. _”Might be your guy. There’s kind of a desk set up near one of the outer walls.”_

 _”One of the unfinished walls,”_ Parker chimed in, and Hardison smiled. As much as his “man behind the screen” schtick grated on him sometimes, he was grateful that Eliot had to regularly deal with Parker’s tight rope walking antics in the field. _I’d have just had a heart attack years ago and been done with it._

It was only a moment – little more than he was ever distracted by thoughts of his teammates in general and Parker specifically – but it was enough for a spike of power to bloom into howling life on one of his monitors. “Guys?” he managed, but before either Parker or Eliot could acknowledge him a burst of feedback ripped across the audio – cutting him off.

He was already searching for the source of the interference when everything in the offices went dark.  
************************  
Eliot was already drawing breath to complain about the burst of static, when he realized that the device in his ear had gone completely dead. “Hardison?”

Okay, so the question had been reflex on his part – born of the pathetic hope that things somehow hadn’t taken the turn they obviously had. He looked across at Parker, but the thief’s expression told him all he needed to know.

 _Dammit._ “Fan out,” he said as softly as he could. Geek or no, anybody capable of taking Hardison off line was somebody they needed to take seriously. _Chaos blew up Nate’s apartment once,_ he reminded himself. “Nobody gets off this floor.”

Nodding, Parker immediately moved in the opposite direction from him. For his part, Eliot turned towards the nest they’d found – giving it a quick once-over. _Bed…clothes…_ There were a few wires that he couldn’t immediately identify, which he supposed supported Hardison’s theory, and the remains of a recent meal, but otherwise very little evidence of the personality they were up against.

 _Not good._ In his experience, this kind of single minded focus was typically born out of some form of radicalization. And while the office building wasn’t in a section of Portland designed for maximum damage, it didn’t necessarily have to be _this_ building he was planning to blow up.

“Eliot!” Parker’s alert managed to drag his thoughts back from an increasingly dark spiral. Shifting gratefully from thought to action, he tore after his teammate.

He could hear growing sounds of a scuffle as he got closer. Praying that whoever their opponent was, he wasn’t armed, Eliot rounded the last corner and caught sight of Parker’s bright hair at last.

She had someone cornered...but it was someone smaller and far more frightened than Eliot had expected. He even found himself questioning the gender for a moment before the sound of a voice that hadn’t made up its mind where it wanted to settle reached his ear. “Don’t hurt me!”

 _Fourteen…fifteen at most…_ “Parker, hold up!” he gasped, grabbing her by the arm as she lunged for what was now unmistakably a terrified teenage boy. “It’s a kid!”

“I know that,” she snapped, pulling against his hold. “How dangerous was Hardison as a kid?”

She had a point – a good one – but now that he’d seen what they were up against, Eliot had lost any desire to settle things with violence. _For now._ “We’re not beating up some frightened homeless kid,” he scowled, letting her go and trusting that she would follow his lead.

“I’m not homeless,” the boy offered quietly, sounding like he was on the verge of tears.

“This isn’t your home, kid,” Eliot countered. “What’s your name?”

It shouldn’t have been as difficult a question as it obviously was. Finally, the boy shrugged. “They call me Ghost.”

It took every bit of the hitter’s remaining self-control not to openly roll his eyes. “You don’t know your name?” Another shrug. “Your family?”

“What did you do to Hardison?” Eliot thought he saw a glimmer of recognition in the boy’s eyes at Hardison’s name, but nothing that led him to think ‘Ghost’ was actively targeting them.

“Wanted…wanted to keep him from finding me,” the boy said. “At least long enough for me to get away. Are you going to arrest me?

Parker snorted. Eliot swatted her without looking. “We’re not the police, kid,” he told the boy. “But you are going to have to come with us and fix whatever it was you broke.”

“You’re going to wish we’d taken you to the police once Hardison gets his hands on you,” Parker added.  
***********************************  
Eliot – the two of them had introduced themselves as soon as Ghost agreed to go with them – took his laptop first thing. Ghost wanted to fight the action, but he’d run into more than a few people like Eliot in his life. All it would take was a slip on the older man’s part and for Ghost it would be like having his arm or foot cut off.

“Don’t give us any trouble and you’ll get it back,” Eliot said, not unkindly, as he handed the laptop off to Parker’s custody.

They let Ghost gather his clothes, and then took him to the ground floor. At each landing the boy sensed others – members of his extended family – spying on them, but if Parker and Eliot noticed they were being watched, neither of them said anything.

“How long ago was your last placement?” The question – from Parker as they reached the car parked in front of the building – caught Ghost off-guard.

“A while,” he admitted. “Left just before my birthday last year.”

To his surprise, she nodded. “Birthdays are tough. I’m not even sure when mine is anymore.”

They put him in the back seat of the car then, driving him to a restaurant. Instead of entering through the front, Eliot drove around to the back of the building. “I hope you’re okay with vegetables,” Eliot said cryptically as they gathered his things and took him inside.

“It’s okay,” Parker told Ghost conspiratorially. “He doesn’t make them slimy or gross. And if you eat them all there’s usually cake.”

Eliot grumbled something that Ghost couldn’t make out. He managed to maintain eye contact with Parker as they walked, but inside his head he felt completely overwhelmed. He’d survived on the street this long by avoiding people, not by learning how to deal with them or how they worked – and from what little he did remember from his life before, Parker and Eliot worked on a different level than anything he’d ever encountered.

“We brought company!” Parker announced as they reached the end of a dimly lit hallway. “And you can’t yell at him or make him fix anything until he’s had food.”

Memory of the fact that she’d threatened him with whoever he was about to meet less than an hour ago rose in Ghost’s mind, but he decided not to bring it up. If Parker had suddenly decided he was worth protecting, he would go along happily.

The room they entered was like something out of a dream, or a television show he could remember from his time in the system. Everything was bright and comfortable, and there was so much _space_! One entire wall was covered in monitors, and in front of it stood another man – powerfully built, but trending more slender than Eliot and with a decidedly more pleasant expression, even if he was frowning at the moment. “Everything’s fixed, thanks,” he drawled.

Dark eyes zeroed in on him then, and Ghost actually took a step back. “Damn,” Alec Hardison breathed. “He’s just a kid!”

“You noticed,” Eliot said. He passed Ghost’s laptop across the long, thin desk that curved around him. “I’m going to see what we’ve got in the kitchen.”

Ghost felt his throat tighten as Hardison opened his computer and began tapping on the keys. He only barely noticed Parker moving him into a seat and relieving him of his bag. “Um…” he managed, once Parker had stepped away, but Hardison raised a warning figure – not bothering to look up from whatever he’d found.

“Grown-up is working, junior. You sit there, and when I’m ready to hear from you, I’ll say so.”  
************************************  
Once he was certain the kid hadn’t booby trapped his drive, Hardison grabbed up one of his spare flash drives and copied everything over. He wasn’t prepared to show his cards just yet, but in the first cluster of seconds Hardison had to admit to himself at least that he was impressed. Now that he knew what he was looking at the kid wasn’t a match for him – but if he put the two of them on a more equal footing, Bryce Petersen now could have kicked Alec Hardison then’s skinny little backside.

“You shut me down from here?” he asked, once he was sure he could trust himself to look at the kid. Eyes impossibly wide in a too-pale face, the boy nodded. “How did you stabilize your connection?”

It was a trick question, but as he listened to the boy explain his means and methods, Hardison felt an unexpected connection growing between them. _There but for the grace of Nana,_ he thought, once again silently blessing the woman that had kept him from so many of the awful things of the world while he was growing up.

“How’re we doing in here?” Eliot reentered, followed by enough of the Bridgeport staff to clue Hardison in that they were apparently all going to eat together.

“Fine,” he said, powering down the laptop and sliding it the length of the desk back into Bryce’s eager hands. “Bryce here was just explaining how he managed to get that little sucker punch in on me.”

Eliot hesitated, his eyes narrowing as he looked from Hardison to the boy. “Bryce, huh? He told Parker and me his name was ‘Ghost’.”

Hardison was grateful to see a faint blush of embarrassment stain the boy’s cheeks. “Name on the computer registry’s Bryce Petersen…please tell me you did not hang yourself with that label.” He addressed the last to the boy, who had been momentarily distracted by the plate heaped with food Eliot had set in front of him.

Bryce looked up at him again. “No…um…no sir. That’s what the people in the building started calling me.”

“Okay,” Hardison conceded, somewhat mollified. “We’ll keep that in reserve, in case you need it in the future. For now, understand that only losers in our world have aliases.”

“You talk like he’s staying,” Eliot said, smoothly sweeping the laptop back out of the boy’s reach and glaring at Bryce. “Eat first, play with your little toy later.”

“Of course he’s staying,” Parker chimed in, hopping up to sit on the desk itself. “We need his help with the job, and Eliot already said letting people continue to live in that building wasn’t okay.”

Moving forward before Eliot could react, Hardison took Bryce’s computer back into custody. “That’s settled then.” He knew the arguments Eliot would eventually muster, and at the moment Hardison suspected he agreed with a lot of them. In the short term though, there was no better place for a boy like Bryce than with someone like him – and with Parker obviously on his side, Hardison knew that was exactly how it would play out.


End file.
